During long renders, I’ve been working on a little automation. For a long time I had wanted to make it easier to start up my little render ‘farm’ (just a few machines) and streamline the process of installing new versions of Houdini on them. I had long pushed this effort back using the excuse that one of the machines was still running windows which would require different logic than the other Ubuntu based machines. As the windows machine has since been migrated to Ubuntu as well this excuse was gone…

So while all my machines (including workstation) were very busy rendering, my workstation could just spare enough cycles to run a few terminal windows and a few text editor windows.

As is typical for my ‘internal’ projects, things grew a bit bigger than originally intended . The result of this work is a collection of scripts that let me:

• boot and shutdown render machines
• switch between the latest version 10 or 11 that happens to be installed on a render machine
• retrieve the chassis status of any render machine (on or off)
• retrieve local or remote hserver status
• open a remote (through ssh) shell to a render machine
• install a version of houdini on a render machine
• publish a set of scripts to a render machine that are used by the above where needed

(more…)